The present disclosure relates systems and methods for detecting and monitoring patient conditions in clinical medicine settings.
Patient care in a hospital setting involves a complex management process because healthcare workers address multiple patient issues simultaneously. Decisions about patient priority and care made by the healthcare workers are subjective to some degree and may vary depending on the level of expertise and experience of each person involved in patient care. In addition, patients' complaints and symptoms are often complex, because a disease process may have its own associated complications, and a disease may also affect other concurrent patient conditions. Patients may also bring with them a degree of subjectivity in describing their symptoms, which may generate both variable indications of clinical conditions.
Uncontrolled complexity is a cause of large numbers unnecessary death in hospitals. Unfortunately hundreds of common but subtle modes of failure which lead to complications and death can potentially occur with every patient in the hospital. However, present hospital patient monitoring devices are entirely insufficient relative this level of complexity. There is an acute need for a quantum advance in patient data processing which is capable of managing the actual pathophysiologic complexity present. Without such technology vast numbers of unnecessary deaths can be expected to continue in hospitals, unabated and worldwide.
One common example of the challenges involved in detecting complex patient conditions, is undetected septic shock. Whether or not a given patient with an infection progresses to shock often depends on a complex relationship of patient-specific physiologic responses to immunologic and inflammatory perturbation as well as the physiologic state of the patient at the onset and during the perturbation and the timeliness and adequacy of intervention (e.g. antibiotics and/or fluid). These factors interact to define the dynamic state of the patient. This level of complexity, evolving as a “silent” mechanism of death on a busy hospital ward, represents a major threat to patients worldwide.